Boehner struggles with nod to diversity in homogeneous party

>>> there's a bunch of new news today about how the republican party is trying to have talk amongst themselves about what went wrong for them this election cycle, how they positioned themselves to shore up what it is they stand for after this bad year. beyond the news about my boyfriend from high school dick army leaving his koch brothers mega group. there's more ahead about the party's strange new round of decision making. that story is coming up.

>>> before e we get to that last story tonight, there's something that i think went unusually unnoticed, i guess, in today's news from washington. something that might end up being important. remember at the beginning of last week the republican party made news when they picked committee chairs for their 19 republican-led committees. they pick. ed 19 white men. john boehner tried to do a little damage control with the two that he personally can choose. but he had a problem in trying to give one of those two to a woman because the republican membership of the committees contained no women . no women members. so no women to choose from in trying to find a female committee chair. ultimately john boehner decided to break all precedent going back to the 1800s so he could pick a woman to be a chair of one of the committees even though she was not a member of that committee. john boehner still has one to bestow. the man who currently holds the house ethics committee chair is bonner. he said he doesn't want the job this time. but again, how is it going to be a woman? there are no republican women on that committee. so who knows. there have been no republican women on that committee in years. this one might even be more awkward than the last one that john boehner had to go through gyrations to fix. good luck on that, mr. speaker. honestly, the problem that republicans have in trying to appear diverse in their leadership is that they just don't have a deep pool of republican-elected women to choose from. there aren't that many. here's what just happened to make that worse. republicans already had like no women in congress. before this last election out of 241 members of congress, only 24 republicans were women . 24 republicans heading into the last election. after this election, they went down. they went from 24 down to 20. a net loss of four. today that net loss of four became a net loss of five because jo ann of 5 because missouri's eight district announced that she is quitting. she was just re-elected to her ninth term in congress, 72% of the vote. but she's stepping down to become ceo of the national world cooperation. basically, she's stepping down to be a lobbyist. by her leaving, the proportion of women among the republicans in congress drops into the single digits in the 21st century and maybe they will keep doing these ornate jgymnastic backbends to make it look like that is not true. [ emily